First We Kill All the Lawyers

No takebacks Last month, the official White House photo stream on Flickr switched from a Creative Commons attribution license to a brand-new “U.S. Government Work license” that Flickr created specially for this photostream, but which probably applies to almost all photos contributed by the federal government. Why create a brand-new “license”? Because works of the […]

Write for a blog long enough, it’s bound to happen. You see a link in your referrer logs, find something on Google, get an email from a reader… you follow the link, and there it is: your hard work, spread across someone else’s page, used as bait for ad revenue or something worse. David Risley […]

Attorney General Bill McCollum clearly does not want to restrict Florida attorneys from helping Florida homeowners fight their foreclosures, and his recent letter to Florida Bar President Jay White may offer some cover to those attorneys who do.

NOTE: I’m writing more about this at the Florida Foreclosure Fraud weblog. Florida’s new Foreclosure Rescue Fraud law Last week, Florida Governor Charlie Crist signed a new law which imposes broad-ranging restrictions on so-called “foreclosure rescue” service providers. The well-intentioned bill is meant to curb the worst abuses by bottom-feeding predators who use foreclosure as […]

Having trouble selling your home in this sagging real estate market? Clementina Marie Giovannetti of Ocala, Florida, apparently was, too. So she’s decided to give her $1.25 million mansion away. Crazy? Don’t answer yet. She’s having a contest, and the submission of the winning “Pet Lover” essay gets the house. Contestants have to write a […]

I wrote almost exactly a year ago about the lawsuit against Turnitin.com filed by several Virginia high school students, alleging that the anti-plagiarism service violated the students’ intellectual property rights. Then, I said, “Does Turnitin have a valid defense? There are two likely possibilities: fair use, and license.” My predictions (unlike, say, my stock picks) […]

If you run a business, and you have a website, you may or may not know whether disabled users – the blind, the mobility-impaired, and others – can access your web site with their helper technology. And, from a lawyer’s perspective, even more important, you may not know whether you are violating federal law if […]

Anyone who works with the Federal courts will be familiar with PACER, the federal judiciary’s electronic public records system. The great thing about PACER is that any current (I’m not sure how many years are encompassed) court case is in the system, allowing the public to access any document filed in any federal court case. […]

As Lewis Black once said: The only thing worse than a Republican or a Democrat, is when these two pricks work together! Basically how it works in congress is that a Republican stands up and says ‘Hey, I got a really bad idea’, and a Democrat stands up and says ‘And I can make it […]